The City of Murfreesboro is set to open the new $1.5 million Kingdom Drive bridge that will cross Overall Creek to Overall Creek Elementary School on the western side of the City. The bridge extension will officially open to traffic at 11 a.m. Friday, March 15, with traffic controls in-place.

The new bridge offers residents of area neighborhoods, including Kingdom Ridge subdivision, The Preserve at Kingdom Ridge Apartments and neighborhoods along Rucker lane, an alternative east-west connection to and from Highway 96 (Franklin Road) and Veterans Parkway.

“The new bridge will ease access to Overall Creek Elementary School and the growing west side of Murfreesboro,” said Public Works Division Executive Director and City Engineer Chris Griffith. “It is also expected to help reduce traffic on New Salem Highway (Hwy 99).”

Prior to the bridge connector to Overall Creek, residents in The Preserve at Kingdom Ridge area only had access to the elementary school by taking Covenant Blvd. to Franklin Road, which is also congested with traffic due to the current widening construction of a 0.365 section (SR) Hwy 96 and a new state bridge over Overall Creek by TDOT which began in January 2018. The section is being widened to five lanes.

The Kingdom Ridge development required redesigning to accommodate a road and bridge to connect to Overall Creek Elementary.

Overall Creek Elementary opened in 2014 and has a student population of 1093, many from the Rucker Lane area. The Kingdom Drive bridge is part of an aggressive transportation plan to alleviate congestion and one of several bridge projects to improve traffic throughout the City. Another bridge crossing Puckett Creek will open in late this spring to link St. Andrews Drive to Rucker Lane by extending Perlino Drive off St. Andrews to several subdivision streets including Higdon Drive off Rucker Lane.

The Murfreesboro 2040 Major Transportation Plan also includes future bridges over Interstate 24 to connect the growing west side of Murfreesboro to the rest of the City.

The full cost of the project was approximately $2.3 million with the developer and Consolidated Utility District (CUD) sharing in the funding. The City’s portion was approximately $1.5 million.

The Public Works division includes Engineering, Transportation and Urban Environmental along with the Street Department. Chris Griffith has served as the City Engineer in Murfreesboro for nearly 14 years where he was first hired as a Project Engineer in May 2002. He has over 29 years engineering experience in both the private and public sectors. Griffith holds a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Tennessee Tech University in Cookeville.